The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois, a problematized documentary project, explores the larger-than-life persona and culturally-weighted sexuality found in the visual fragments and wondrous archive of Michelle du Bois. An American woman who turned tricks while traveling through post-WWII Pacific Rim cities during the 70s and 80s, she took, collected and kept hundreds of tourist photographs, family snapshots, and pornographic images of herself. Her problematic and slippery identity, her exotic everyday, culturally, sexually and otherwise, becomes manifest through her personal experience, proposing an identity that rises from within rather than any social construct imposed upon her from the outside. Playing with the imaginary du Bois engages in, perpetuates and represents — her fantasy of Asia, the fantasies she poses for, the artist’s fantasy of her and her fantasy of the artist, along with the fantasy of the archive, the false promise of travel and an obsession with transience and the identities it provokes- the work manifests as reconfigured clusters of images and, ultimately, a book.

Claremont Museum of Art: 18 May — 31 August, 2008